


Baby bomb

by AuntyAgonee



Series: We don't know where we came from, but we won't go back [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Mysterious parentage, Single dad Bro, Young Dave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-24
Updated: 2014-08-24
Packaged: 2018-02-14 11:01:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2189220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuntyAgonee/pseuds/AuntyAgonee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I thought maybe she was some crime-fighting badass bitch who saved you from a supervillain, who was like, using you as the damsel hostage, then you thanked her with your dick and boom!: sudden Dave and since motherhood and superhero-ism don’t mix, she left me on your doorstep in a pizza box or something."</p><p>After weeks of wondering who his mother was, Dave finally got up the courage to ask Bro how he came into the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby bomb

Your name is Dave Strider.  
You’re that weird kid who never takes his sunglasses off, who prefers to be play on his own during recess by sitting on top of the climbing frame and pretending your schoolmates are zombies and air-sniping them, which has caused a couple of parent-teacher visits to the school because your teacher is afraid you’re a ‘deeply disturbed’ child. Well that nosy bitch is damned right. You sure are, because you just discovered something in Science class the other day that is supposed to be true for every family on earth and in your house it isn’t true at all.  
According to the science teacher, every family with kids has a mom and a dad who made those kids. Maybe the mom and the dad won’t be around to raise the kid, but everyone starts with a mom and a dad. You are eight godamned years old and you had no idea moms were a necessity to make a kid. It boggles your mind, especially the process kids are made by. The more you heard of it the more you wanted to forget you had heard it. In fact, you couldn’t even look at Bro when he picked you up from school that day. You weren’t ready to forget the things moms and dads do to each other to make a baby, or forgive him for doing that to some lady to make you. Hella gross. You’re never gonna have kids.  
The past few days have been spent imaging what kind of person your mom must have been to enchant a weirdo like Bro, then to actually agree to do the…baby dance…with him. In between the sizeable chunks of time you spend dodging Bro’s spirited attempts to spar or ask you why you keep sliding under the furniture every time you see him coming, you have thought about it ceaselessly and narrowed your mom’s identity into a few possibilities.  
The first: she is a god. You are a demigod. Bro attacks you so frequently to prepare you for the hostile world of monsters that lurks behind the Mist, waiting for a chance to drink your semi-divine blood, and you’re going to spend next summer at Camp-Halfblood. Going by your sweet, disarmingly adorable looks, you think you might be in the Aphrodite cabin.  
The second is more plausible than Greek gods, but only a little. Your mom was a vampire. She and Bro had a volatile Twilight-thingie going, had you, then Bro got sick of her sparkly ass and float, emo shit and kicked her out, keeping you because he didn’t trust your mom to take care of you as she roamed across the country, biting necks and leaving a trail of broken hearts.  
The third is too weird to be true, because if super heroes really existed then the media would have picked up on them by now, but you wonder if she was a super hero. Maybe she saved Bro from a raging criminal genius and Bro offered her the baby dance to show his thanks, then she left him like a heartbreaker. Later she discovered she was pregnant, and upon deciding motherhood was not compatible with her superhero lifestyle, she pulled the good old ding-dong-dash and left you on Bro’s doorstep in a pizza box or something.  
The fourth and final possibility is the most likely and the most depressing: mom just ran out on Bro. It happens at school to other kids’ parents. Sometimes you’ll overhear some kids talking about how a friend’s parents got a thing called a ‘divorce’, which you think must be a gladiator-style fight to the death, from the way the divorce tends to traumatise the kid involved. Maybe it didn’t work out between them, even though they really loved each other a lot? Bro is kinda weird. She probably couldn’t deal with his ironic style of weird and fled the awesomeness before it killed her, leaving behind her baby: you.  
Eventually, the suspense becomes too much for you to bear and you decide you’ll have to brave a meeting with Bro to discuss how you came into the world, where your mom is, if you even have a mom. You haven’t considered the possibility that your Bro might be a Sis until you have already made it clear to Bro that you wanna talk. That would be totally ok with you if Bro is a physical Sis; you just wanna know why you don’t have a mom.

Bro is summoned to the kitchen table by a note you left pinned to the shower curtain with a Kurdish knife. You wait for him patiently. Two of the three chairs are already filled, with you placed opposite Bro and Lil Cal in the seat adjacent to you. You figured the entire family should be present for this talk.  
Within fifteen minutes of your pinning the note, Bro pops his head around the doorjamb. He peers over you at the top of his shades, suspicious and probably amused. He expects you to shoot a firecracker at him or throw a knife or maybe that you have booby-trapped the chair drawn out for him.  
“Hey kiddo.” he says and approaches carefully “So you avoid me for days and then I get summoned to the show-down at (he checks his watch) high noon? Hmm, nicely done.”  
You gesture to the seat “Please, have a seat.” Then you knit your hands together in front of you like you have seen the mob bosses do in the movies.  
He takes his seat after checking it for tacks or a spring-load that might launch him through the ceiling when he sits down(true story: the neighbours never came over to complain about the almost daily strifing-sessions on the roof ever again). Glancing between you and Lil Cal, whose hands you arranged in a position like your current one earlier, he bites down on a smile and forces a serious expression to his face. “What can I do for you?”  
“How old were you when you got me?”  
Bro doesn’t bat an eyelash “Seventeen.”  
“That’s illegal.” You don’t actually know if it is, but a lot of the stuff Bro does technically is, so you assume it naturally.  
“Just a little bit.” he agrees. “Does it bother you?” now a hesitant note enters his voice. “Is somebody giving you shi-uh, a hard time about how young I am?”  
You shake your head, lying, not that it bothers you…much “It doesn’t bother me that you’re only (you do the sum quickly in your head) twenty-five and have a nine year old kid. What bothers me is how you got a nine-year old kid without a lady friend.”  
Bro takes his shades off and puts them on the table in front of him. The gloves are off, because the shades only come off when shit is about to get emotionally serious. Or when he’s about to attempt an ambitious attack and doesn’t want to risk cracking his shades. His eyes stray to Lil Cal for a second, introducing the new terrifying possibility to you that Lil Cal might be your mom, then he locks eyes with you. His expression is very earnest.  
“There are plenty of ways boy-dudes can get kids without a lady-dude.” he says “Maybe I adopted you.”  
You shake your head “Bro, I’m a mini-Bro. That shit ain’t gonna fly.”  
He laughs “Caught me, you caught me. You’re right. We’re blood.”  
Time to get to the point “So. Babies happen when adults get together and do the baby dance-”  
The beginning of your speech is rudely interrupted by a loud snort from Bro. He claps a hand over his mouth and motions for you to keep going.  
“Who was your partner? I mean I have a few ideas about who she was…I thought maybe I’m a demigod and you’ve been training me for a life on the run, but nothing close to the omnipotence a god’s supposed to have would go anywhere near you. Also some monsters woulda shown up by now. Then I wondered if she was a vampire because you love Twilight-”  
He starts to protest. You are prepared for this: you bring out a copy of Breaking Dawn which sat hidden in Lil Cal’s lap and wave it around smugly. Cool as a cucumber, he pretends it doesn’t bother him that you have found the stash of shitty tween romances he uses like comfort food when he gets depressed about being chronically single, even though he knows you see through his bullshit in a second and that he’ll be moving the stash as soon as you’re in bed tonight.  
“But then I thought, wait a fucking second, vampires don’t just go settling down with random seventeen year olds just because Twilight says so. I mean, maybe her being a vampire would explain why my eyes are all weird-”  
“Quit calling yourself weird.” he frowns “I hate hearing that word. I prefer ‘unique’ or ‘wilfully eccentric’.”  
The glare you give him shuts him up again. “But vampires are stupid and you’re not dumb enough to fall for vampires…in real life. I thought maybe she was some crime-fighting badass bitch who saved you from a supervillain, who was like, using you as the damsel hostage, then you thanked her with your dick and boom!: sudden Dave and since motherhood and superhero-ism don’t mix, she left me on your doorstep in a pizza box or something…or maybe you guys were a couple and it was all too early and you guys just fell the fuck right out of love.”  
On the last words, you feel your throat growing thick and a pressure behind your eyes, but you’re determined not to cry. After a long pause, Bro sighs and reaches for your hands across the table. You let him squeeze them and wonder who the hell would ever leave this guy anyway, if they were sure he loved them. You get that love-love is different from loving your kid but…seriously, what kind of crazy bitch would give him up?  
“You know what? You are waaaaaay off on this mom thing. Want me to be honest?”  
Swallowing hard, you nod “Brutal honesty. Crushing honesty. Hit me with the honesty train.”  
“I don’t know where you came from. I don’t know whose you were before you got here, and fuck ‘em because you’re my twerp now, and I don’t know you look like somebody smacked a young me on a photocopier. I’ll tell you how you got here.” he stops, looking reluctant “You can believe me or you can slap me and call me a liar or whatever but you…you’re…uh. Oh fuck it, Dave?”  
“Yeah?”  
“You blew up my house.”  
“Baby boom.” you quip, although you don’t think it is remotely funny and you don’t want to joke and you are seriously considering taking Bro up on his offer to slap him. Even though he claims you’re his and he acknowledges the creepy similarity, he denies being related to you. In fact has he ever told you how he is related to you? You always assumed Bro was your father and hated his dad or something, so he didn’t want to be called the same thing by his own child. Not that he was your brother –or sister living as a brother. Definitely not that he was some random dude whose house you blew the fuck up.  
Bro registers your reaction. His face falls, but he ploughs on “I was seventeen years old and fucking around, being young and stupid and arrogant and all that shit. I had a mom and a dad (is it your imagination, or does he seem to shiver when he mentions this?) and I went to school and all that stuff. Then one day I came home and there was this giant-ass smoking hole in the ground where my house used to be, the police were swarming it and this officer comes up to me weeping with joy and telling me it was a miracle, blessed by god, heavenly child, blah blah blah and then he hands me you and he’s all like “your baby brother is still alive” and I was literally so surprised I didn’t say “wait a fucking minute, this ain’t my brother, I’m an only child!”. Turns out a meteor had hit my house while I was at the library. Lucky for me part of my room had survived so I wasn’t entirely, like, unclothed. Snagged that awesome raggedy-ass bunny too, and that’s how you got that heirloom.  
“I didn’t know what to do with you. I mean I never even thought about not taking you in, because they were already treating us like we were bros, y’know? It was like reality changed around you once the meteor hit. My parents left us a nice inheritance, so I used some of it to get us set up here. Lots of it is still in savings. Now I’m raising you. And we’re here, talking about your secret origins…so…yeah. That good enough for you?”  
You shake your head “One detail doesn’t make sense in your stupid story. If your parents left us a nice inheritance, why did you rent this shitty-ass apartment of all the places in the world to raise a child?”  
Bro laughs “You caught me.” he withdraws his hands and stands abruptly, mussing your hair “Got to go do some Bro stuff. See you later you little butt.”  
He tucks Lil Cal under his arm and exits at an unusually frantic pace. The door to the bathroom slams and if you strain your ears, you think you can hear the sounds of screaming muffled by a towel.  
Well.  
That didn’t solve a single thing. If anything, it actually raised more questions. You slump in your chair and fold your knees against the edge of the table, wondering if you should sulk or be happy he at least went to the effort of making up such an elaborate story for you. Ok, so he bullshitted his way through that like the pro he is. Maybe he’s just not ready to talk about it yet. You’ll ask him in a few months, if you haven’t moved onto bigger and better question than the background of your mom by then, like whether or not Lil Cal really does have an evil human soul trapped in him.  
You already know what’s important.  
Bro loves you. You love him. You guys are a family.  
And most importantly, you know where he hides the cookies and you feel like you deserve a treat after that emotionally draining episode.

**Author's Note:**

> Please ignore the chronological impossibility of Twilight existing at some point during Dave's early child hood.


End file.
